creative agenda game

[Emily Care]

Michael,

Here's another thread, Creative agenda only retroactive? that may help shine a light on CA. It pretty much puts the intent vs. actions question to rest. According to the model, the CA is what happens in play. What's expressed by your actions and decisions, not what is dreamed up or hoped for. But that's what we've been talking about here. What came out of a given game, or what we put into one.

Does that hit CA? For some reason it's just not clicking with me, I'm not sure if that's actually CA or something else.

Was what you wrote what made the game gripping and memorable for you? Or was it what you hoped/intended to do in the game? Or something else?

And for the keyword, when I wrote mine, I thought of it as the critical element that made everything else work better, and without which it would have been changed essentially.

Just as a foot note, I feel like we're using the term Creative Agenda a little loosly in this thread. Ron pretty specifically narrows it to comprise The Dream, Step on Up, and Story Now. It seems to me like we're not talking so much about specific Creative Agendas that we have enjoyed, but more that we're talking about specific Techniques and Ephemira and such that we successfuly used to support our Agenda, whatever it happened to be at the time.

Thanks, Nathan. Yes, I think the applications of it have been pretty loose.  I didn't realize Ron defined it to be so narrow. (Though I've half been waiting for the big k'bosh to be put on this thread due to something like that.)  

Ah, here it is from Clarifying Simulationism:

I swear, the more I try, the worse it gets. Now people are trying to separate "creative agenda" from GNS, which is absurd - the new term is defined as the generalized category of which G, N, and S are three types.

That leaves room there for more than g,n and s. If they are three "types", there may be more. Neither this, nor the whole model description limits it just to gns.

--EC
edited 1ce to correct the name of a thread.

[Mark D. Eddy]

What actual methods did I use to make this work? There were a couple that were very important:

After every game session, I asked the players what worked and what didn't in that session. And listened, and modified the game as appropriate to take the criticism and kudos into account. That's why most games had a combat.

When a player introduced or asked about a bit of detail, I would use their idea as a springboard to larger things. There was an entire subplot that was introduced because one player asked "Can I record the session?"

I allowed the players to have sidebar, in character, activities that were allowed to be in-game as long as they told me what they had been up to. This may have been the most important method for the narrativist players, because they took shameless advantage of the opportunity to create themes to spring on the (rest of the) crew.

The secondary techniques that I used that were helpful were as follows:

Players were allowed and encouraged to use instant karma (a Shadowrun fortune mechanic) as an indicator of what they thought was important.

I used the Shadowrun "impact" rules (optional) to reflect the quality of each success or failure, which led to better descriptions of the action.

Some characters were more important than others, but every player got the time they wanted on center stage.

Recurring characters and settings were used as various of the characters discovered that there is a thin line between having a buddy and having a love when under stress.

[anonymouse]

Emily,

Really, it was memorable because it achieved what I wanted it to. I'm not sure I can really identify a proper CA; it was memorable cos it was fun.